Michael Jackson, 65; beer expert helped spur microbreweries

Michael Jackson, a leading authority on beer whose pioneering criticism helped rekindle worldwide interest in breweries, spur the microbrewery movement in the U.S. and rescue a number of historic suds from extinction, has died. He was 65.

Jackson, who became known as “the Beer Hunter” after serving as host of a TV documentary by that name, died of a heart attack Thursday at his London home, his partner, Paddy Gunningham, told the Associated Press. Jackson had Parkinson’s disease.

“He is the single most influential person in the world when it comes to the beer industry today,” Charles Finkel, a former beer and wine importer who owns Pike Brewing Co. in Seattle, told The Times on Friday.

When Jackson’s first major book, “The World Guide to Beer,” was published in 1977, about 40 breweries were producing “essentially boring beer” in the U.S., Finkel said.

Today, there are 1,440 breweries in this country, and almost 1,390 of them are small, independent companies known as craft brewers, according to the Denver-based Brewers Assn.

It was no accident that Jackson’s 30-year career as a self-described beer journalist mirrored a dramatic increase in the number of craft brewers, Finkel said.

“His book was pivotal in the history of beer, because it was the first time that anyone had taken an academic approach to the culture of beer by looking at people’s habits, traditions, how it tastes and the brewing styles,” Finkel said.

“He essentially taught a generation of craft brewers about what these styles were, told them they tasted great and said, ‘Give them a chance and customers will come,’ ” Finkel said.

The book was the result of “20 years’ drinking experience and three years of serious research,” Jackson told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1999.

Julie Bradford, editor of All About Beer magazine, credited Jackson with “changing the way we think about beer. He turned his very fine journalistic and writing skills to the subject of beer before anyone else did, and he gave us a vocabulary for talking about the flavor and diversity of beer.”

By calling attention to obscure beers, Jackson helped revive them. These included oatmeal stouts; the Lambic beers of Belgium that are produced by spontaneous fermentation; and India Pale Ale, a highly hopped English beer from the 18th century that had all but disappeared.

“ ‘Do you ever drink wine?’ people ask me, as though beer were a prison rather than a playground,” Jackson wrote in his 1996 book “The Beer Companion.” “Beer is by far the more extensively consumed but less adequately honored. I want to help put right that injustice.”

Jackson might spend half the year traveling, visiting as many as 200 brewers a year. The 10,000 beers he said he had sampled included a Dutch lager with chlorophyll as an ingredient and an American home brew containing marijuana.

On a busy day, Jackson could sample 50 kinds of beer, and he admitted that hangovers were a hazard of the profession.

The son of a trucker and his textile-worker wife, Jackson was born March 27, 1942, in Leeds in northern England. He grew up in Huddersfield, a working-class town.

At age 16, he dropped out of school to write for a local newspaper, because his family needed the income.

Jackson wrote for the London Daily Mail and became an investigative reporter for the British current affairs television series “World in Action” before deciding to cover beer, a career shift that he had said came about over lunch in a pub with his editor.

It was during the Vietnam War, and Jackson asked if he could fly to Cambodia to do a story when his editor reportedly snapped, “A good reporter can find a good story under his nose.”

“Under my nose was a beer,” Jackson told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 1999.

It was one of the tales the rumpled raconteur told to explain how he became one of the handful of people who made their living with a pen in one hand and a pint in the other.

He continued writing for newspapers and magazines, and his dozen books about beer and whiskey were published in 18 languages and sold millions of copies.

Last year, he won a James Beard Foundation Award for his book “Whiskey: The Definitive World Guide.” Single-malt whiskey was another personal passion, along with boxing and jazz.

Jackson’s nickname, “the Beer Hunter,” was popularized by the six-part 1990 British documentary series in which he roamed the world in search of good beer and good food.

On Jackson’s website, www.beerhunter.com, he addressed the name he shared with the pop singer by saying that he was “not that Michael Jackson” but that he was on a world tour “in pursuit of exceptional beer.”

Despite his profession, he preached moderation.

“You want to drink less but taste more,” he repeatedly said. “Drink less, but drink better.”

In addition to his longtime companion, Jackson is survived by Sam Hopkins, the daughter of his companion; a sister; and two grandchildren.

valerie.nelson@latimes.com